Determining the size and demographics of a television viewing audience helps television program producers improve their television programming and determine a price for advertising during such programming. In addition, accurate television viewing demographics allows advertisers to target certain types and sizes of audiences.
In order to collect these demographics, an audience measurement company may enlist a plurality of television viewers to cooperate in an audience measurement study for a predefined length of time. The viewing habits of these enlisted viewers as well as demographic data about these enlisted viewers is collected and used to statistically determine the size and demographics of a television viewing audience. In some cases, automatic measurement systems may be supplemented with survey information recorded manually by the viewing audience members.
The process of enlisting and retaining participants for purposes of audience measurement can be a difficult and costly aspect of the audience measurement process. For example, participants must be carefully selected and screened for particular characteristics so that the population of participants is representative of the overall viewing population. In addition, the participants must be willing to perform specific tasks that enable the collection of the data and, ideally, the participants selected must be diligent about performing these specific tasks so that the audience measurement data accurately reflects their viewing habits.
For example, audience measurement systems typically require some amount of on-going input from the participating audience member. One method of collecting viewer input involves the use of a people meter. A people meter is an electronic device that is typically disposed in the viewing area and that is proximate to one or more of the viewers. The people meter is adapted to communicate with a television meter disposed in, for example, a set top box, that measures various signals associated with the television for a variety of purposes including, but not limited to, determining the operational status of the television, i.e., whether the television is off or on, and identifying the programming being displayed by the television. Based on any number of triggers, including, for example a channel change or an elapsed period of time, the people meter prompts the household viewers to input information by depressing one of a set of buttons each of which is assigned to represent a different household member. For example, the people meter may prompt the viewers to register, i.e., log in, or may prompt the viewers to indicate that they are still present in the viewing audience. Although periodically inputting information in response to a prompt may not be burdensome when required for an hour, a day or even a week or two, some participants find the prompting and data input tasks to be intrusive and annoying over longer periods of time.
In addition to performing tasks associated with viewing, participants must also be willing to have their media systems modified to enable measurement of their viewing habits, a requirement that typically involves allowing field personnel to gain access to their homes. Allowing access to the home is often viewed as intrusive by would-be participants and requires the would-be participant to schedule a time to allow such access. The would-be participant may also be unwilling to risk the damage that may occur as a result of allowing field personnel to modify an expensive home media system.
Moreover, there are costs associated with engaging and training field personnel who not only install such audience measurement systems in the homes of participants but who also return to the homes on an as-needed basis to repair the equipment and to remove the equipment when the participants are either no longer willing to participate, have moved from their homes, or have reached the end of the term for which they originally agreed to participate.
To reduce the costs and resources required to enlist and retain participants and to engage and train field support, audience measurement companies are researching ways to make participation as convenient as possible for the participants and to minimize the amount of in-home installation/repair required to support in-home audience measurement.
Another aspect of audience measurement involves attempting to measure not only viewing that occurs within the home, referred to as in-home viewing, but also viewing that occurs outside of the home, referred to as out-of-home viewing. In today's world, the average viewer is frequently exposed to media sources outside the home. Specifically, televisions and display monitors are encountered in places such as airports, shopping centers, retail establishments, restaurants and bars, to name only a few locations. To measure out-of-home television viewing, portable devices have been developed to capture audio codes from the audio signals emanating from a television set. These codes are later transmitted to a central data processing facility which uses the codes to identify the programming that was viewed and to properly credit that viewing to the appropriate program. Because such devices are portable, they may be used to measure viewing that occurs both inside the home and outside the home. Unfortunately, these portable audio code detection devices have inherent limitations.
Specifically, these portable devices are unable to distinguish between codes captured as a result of in-home viewing and codes captured as a result of out-of-home viewing. Yet there are characteristic differences between in-home television viewing and out-of-home television viewing that may be of interest to consumers of audience measurement data. Specifically, an in-home viewer often focuses much or all of his attention on the television program being viewed. In contrast, out-of-home television viewing may involve the focused attention of the viewer or may instead involve a brief glance at a television screen as the viewer walks past a television located, for example, in an airport. In addition, in-home television viewing is typically performed on a selective basis, i.e., the viewer likely has control over the selection of programming displayed on the in-home television, whereas out-of-home viewing is less likely to be performed on a selective basis, i.e., the out-of-home viewer is less likely to have individual control over the selection of the programming being displayed on the out-of-home television.
Thus, audience measurement companies are researching ways to distinguish between data associated with in-home television viewing and data associated with out-of-home television viewing.